Music streaming service
Spotify is switching cloud providers. The company, which has headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden and London, United Kingdom, bills itself as a ‘digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs’. The service was established in October 2008 and currently has more than 75 million users. It previously used Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud services, but is now switching to Google Cloud.
“This is a big deal,” explained Nicholas Harteau, the Vice President of Engineering and Infrastructure at Spotify on the company’s blog. “At Spotify we are obsessed with providing a streaming experience that feels as though you have all the music in the world on your phone.” He went on to say, “Google has long been a thought-leader in this space, and this shows in the sophistication and quality of its data offerings. From traditional batch processing with Dataproc, to rock-solid event delivery with Pub/Sub to the nearly magical abilities of BigQuery, building on Google’s data infrastructure provides us with a significant advantage where it matters the most”.
Initially Spotify’s approach to its infrastructure was to buy or lease data center space, server hardware, and networking gear. However, the global shift to the cloud made this approach redundant. Its transition to Google’s cloud will take place over the coming months. Spotify will also utilize Google Cloud Datastore and Google Cloud Bigtable for data and deploy Google's cloud networking services, including Cloud VPN and Cloud Router.
“It’s not every day you move a 75 million+ user company from a home-grown infrastructure to the cloud,” suggested Google Cloud Platform’s Lead Sales Engineer Guillaume Leygues. “What makes us most excited to work with Spotify is their company-wide focus on forward-looking user experiences,” he added. “Now that they’ve begun using Google Cloud Platform, we can’t wait to see what Spotify builds next”.
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